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F(rancis) O(tto) Matthiessen
(April 1, 1902 - April 1, 1950) U.S.A.

Matthiessen

Teacher, and critic

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MatthiessenBorn in Pasadena, California, after his parents' divorce in 1915, he lived on his grandmother's farm in Illinois, attendend boarding school in Tarrytown, New York, and joined the Canadian Air Force towards the end of WWI. Matthiessen graduated from Yale, was a Rhodes Scholar, and received Ph.D. from Harvard, before becming an instructor at Yale (1927-29), then professor of American literaure and criticism of poetry at harvard (1929-50). An influential teacher, he was liberal in politics, deeply religious, and incisive in literary judgements.

His books include: Sara Orne Jewett (1929), a lesbian author; American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), a monumental work which discussed the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, gay author Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and gay poet Walt Whitman; and The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950).

His longtime lover and life partner, the gay painter Russell Cheney, shared a cottage with him in Kittery, Maine for decades.

He taught at Harvard University until his premature death by suicide, because of his depression about his partner's death, and the increasingly homophobic atmosphere of late 1940s USA. Matthiessen jumped to his death from a twelfth-story window of a Boston hotel, shortly before he was to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Candid love letters between Matthiessen and his partner of 20 years, Russell Cheney, were published in 1978 in Rat & the Devil, and also appear in Rictor Norton's recently published My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries.

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